In the past week we have seen a swarm of negative commentary about Tony Abbott in the media. I say, enough is enough!

Firstly, we should all exude an immense pity for his predicament. At heart, Mr Abbott originally wished to be a more infrastructure building right-wing politician. However, he has found himself leading a party whose official policy is the opposite of this, in dogmatically pushing for small government austerity. That is a task Mr Abbott has taken up with dog like obedience, while not forgetting to grumble as a contradictory aside that he originally dreamed of being remembered as an infrastructure prime minister.

Austerity measures have gone down with all the popularity of bomb with the Australian voting public. Add climbing unemployment to a waning mining bomb, and you have a cauldron of seething discontent from the public. This will only get worse as the mining boom continues to wane.

If politicians really had power, rather than being puppets within the macroscopic structure of a larger system that props them up in the puppet theatre of parliament, then perhaps Abbott might have gotten his way to start Keynesian infrastructure building measures to stimulate the economy. The Party, however, will not permit that.

Instead, the Party shows itself increasingly willing to sacrifice Mr Abbott for his failure to sell austerity to the public. Mr Abbott has been warned that he is expendable.

Meanwhile, it is certainly true that Mr Abbott’s caustic and divisive style is more suited as leader of the opposition than as prime minister. I actually thought that the Liberal Party would replace him with a more conciliatory and uniting centrist figure just before the last elections—effectively stepping down the opposition attack dog in favour of someone who could provide stable leadership over two terms of government.

Admittedly, it is true that Abbott was a frightfully effect leader of the opposition, and a perpetual thorn in the side for Labour and the Greens. However, if Abbott was an effective leader of the opposition for the Liberal Party, as Prime Minister, Abbott has proved an equally effective leader of the opposition for the Labour Party. In fact, Abbott is a an infinitely more effective leader of the opposition than the ineffectual Bill Shorten.

Abbott played on the growing discontent towards Canberra during the Rudd-Gillard years, a discontent that was the result of the socio-economic destabilisation from the GFC. Now, as the mining boom wanes, and Australia loses the buffering effect it had on the Australian economy, the economy finds itself increasingly exposed to the stormy seas of the international market, simmering discontent towards Canberra looks set to explode.

Australians were deceived into thinking that the prosperity of the Howard years had even an iota to do with the economic management of the Howard-Costello team. Voters imagined that by returning the Liberals to power that China would start purchasing billions of dollars of minerals once again, and that the prosperity of the mining boom would return. The voting public has now discovered that Tony Abbott is hardly the leader of the Chinese Communist Party!

Supremely effective as leader of the opposition, Abbott’s supremacy as leader of the opposition even now remains uncontested. He has yet to step up to become the Prime Minister of Australia. Everything that made Abbott an effective leader of the Liberal opposition makes him a toxic liability as “Prime Minister”. I imagine many of those in the Liberal Party regret not having made a change in leadership before the elections, and feel stuck with Abbott. Now, it is too late, and they know they are damned if they change the leadership, just as they are damned if they don’t.

If truth be known, a change of leadership to Turnbull or Bishop would have been a disaster for the Left. Unless, of course, they managed to appoint Christopher Pyne or Scott Morrison as Prime Minister. They would be even more effective than Abbott as leader of the opposition.

Then again, even if the Party leadership is changed, it will hardly change the Liberal Party’s overall set of dogmas. It will merely be a different leader who will be forced to push them onto the public even where it is contrary to their personal principles.

There nonetheless remains no doubt that the Left should heartily welcome the fact that the Liberal Party has chosen to stick with the highly divisive Tony Abbott. He is a free gift served up on a silver platter, even if on this occasion it was not done in the manner of John the Baptist. Abbott is the best chance that the Left has for a one-term Liberal government, when a mortally wounded and highly divisive leader drags a fractured Party towards electoral slaughter at the next federal election.

So with that, a tribute and toast to our beloved Prime Minister—the Right Honourable Tony Abbott. Ladies and gentlemen—God save the Queen!

This is my first blog entry for 2015. I hope all readers have had a great holiday period.

A lot has happened in Australia since my last entry. Much of what has happened has followed a course largely following what I predicted, but the explosive volatility of the situation means that a lot is going to happen that is impossible to precisely predict.

Firstly, as the mining boom wanes and unemployment climbs, the interest rate has been cut by the Reserve Bank of Australia. At the same time, the Australian dollar is tanking. When currencies are overvalued, as the AUD was on reaching parity with the USD, this is often followed by a swing in the opposite direction leading it to be undervalued.

A rate cut will accelerate the decline of the value of the AUD, as it becomes less attractive to overseas investors as a high yield currency. The US Federal reserve may well soon raise interest rates, whereupon the AUD may collapse in value. I would not be surprised to see the AUD drop consistently to around the 65-69 cent to the US dollar mark, or even transiently to around the 55-59 cents to the US dollar during periods of volatility, before eventually climbing back to historical averages.

This type of wild swing in currency value leading to gross undervaluation has historically often lead to a banking crisis. If the economy worsens and there are increasing numbers of distressed sellers and mortgage defaults, this would exacerbate any banking crisis. A deflation spiral from deleveraging will also cause stress on banks. The values of bank shares will likely plummet to historical lows.

It will not be long before the interest rates here will reach close to zero and we will soon see the Reserve Bank of Australia undertaking quantitative easing. In fact, they might as well start now, if they had any foresight. The government may have to bail out some banks soon to the tune of billions.

While the media circus portrays dissatisfaction with Tony Abbott as a personality game, it more likely reflects growing economic stress amongst the general population. Nor will replacing one personality with another do anything towards improving the state of the economy.

As long as the Liberal Party pursues austerity, personality games matters little. Unless there is a fundamental change in economic strategy, all media circus personality games will do is provide fodder for Murdoch tabloids peddling salacious stories while the economy goes down like the Titanic. The government should really be thinking about an aggressive round of stimulus right now before the ground collapses underneath them and they end up a one term government.

The Australian Liberal Party need to take a leaf out of the page of the Japanese Liberal Party. That, however, is exceedingly unlikely, as the Australian Liberals would rather die an agonising political death than to wake up to find that they are “all Keynesians now”. This represents a fair dinkum Aussie variety of harakiri.

I suspect the last post decrying the Direct Action policy of the Liberal government as a pointless tree hugging exercise would probably be greeted as neither fish nor fowl for most. That is a good thing, though it will hardly prove popular, since pointing out that a market mechanism for carbon trading is ironically more of a hard-nosed free market economic based reform than Direct Action will hardly prove popular with anyone.

The problem with most green politics types is that they are too concerned about hugging trees, and waste their time and breath trying to convert their political rivals into fellow tree huggers. Sadly, however well meaning such sentimental environmentalism is, it is a complete waste of time, since it merely preaches to the converted, but will prove perfectly counter-productive, as it constitutes an open invitation for contrarian right-wingers to increase their wanton destruction of the environment for monetary gain.

Previous studies have suggested that focussing on the economic benefits of the development of a clean energy future is far more effective as a means generating positive views about the field. That is why it is probably totally ineffectual to harp on about global warming doomsday scenarios, however perfectly scientifically accurate they may be.

The following is an excellent example of a mainstream investment advisor’s perspective on the clean energy sector:

Keep in mind that this is not a video from a green energy investment group. Note that the speaker says that with the increasing demands for energy from growth in the developing world, there will simply be insufficient fossil fuel to meet future energy demands. The solution is simple: invest in technology to manufacture clean fuels at will without having to enter into a conflict over a dwindling resource.

As for the negative opinion about solar energy expressed by the speaker in the video, we should remember that solar cells are still a technology in its infancy. We should not forget this fact:

Solar panels may be bulky, cumbersome, and inefficient today, but that will change in due course. The same technological transformations will advance solar energy as it did IT technology.

And, the simple fact is that the masters of the world tomorrow will be those who own the clean energy patents, not those who hold geopolitical hegemony over Middle Eastern oil fields. That means that with every day that goes by, fossil fuels technology is getting closer to going the way of the abacus and the dial-up modem. Waging multi-trillion dollar wars in the Middle East, or propping up dubious political regimes to divide and conquer for hegemony over Middle Eastern oil fields will simply be reduced to a pointless and unnecessary waste of time and money. That is bad news for Israel.

The struggle for geopolitical rivalry over energy sources is ancient. For example, the war between the Roman Empire and the Carthaginian Empire can be seen as an energy resource driven geopolitical rivalry. The oil over which they fought was olive oil, or more specifically they fought to gain hegemony over the olive oil trade routes. That was the fuel that they burnt in lamps, cooked with, and traded in. Whoever had political hegemony over Mediterranean trade routes had hegemony over the known Western world, including over the Middle East, over which the Roman Empire maintained better long term control than any other Western empire before or since.

Today, geopolitical tensions in the Middle East are being fueled by a quite different kind of oil. Yet even WWII can be seen as struggle for hegemony over oil supplies. The British, Americans, and Russians maintained control over oil fields, with the result that Germany and Japan simply ran out of oil to continue fighting.

Subsequent battles between American backed Israel and Arab nations are all a continuation of this struggle for sovereignty over oil fields. Alas, the Pax Americana has proven to be as unstable as the Pax Britannica that once ruled over the Middle East. Both of these powers could have learnt a thing or two from the way the Romans not only won the war, but convincingly won the peace, the Pax Romana, in the Middle East.

However, the time when maintenance of energy driven need for Middle Eastern hegemony is gradually coming to an end. That means that the race is on for technological hegemony within the coming clean energy technology sector. Unfortunately, we have a Prime Minister in Tony Abbott who has loudly committed himself to an Australian energy future based on a 20th century technology that is rapidly aging, and looks set to become redundant. That means Australia has committed itself to a future of economic and technological redundancy. This represents nothing less than Tony Abbott’s personal death-wish for the economic future of Australia.

In the mainstream discourse on climate change, the narrative is constantly repeated that tackling climate change is purely a philanthropic exercise, akin to donating money to a charity devoted to saving the polar bear out of pure good will. We are then told that the Australian government is in debt, that there is “budget emergency”, meaning that Australia cannot possibly afford to donate money to such a charity. We are told that there is allegedly great uncertainly amongst the scientific community about whether climate change is even real or not. That means that, however cute polar bears might be, money donated to the climate change charity might be going down the drain anyway. The good will should therefore be reconsidered.

The counter-discourse to this goes that due to climate change, the oceans are rising as polar ice caps melt, and islands in the Pacific are under threat of disappearing under water. For the sake of adverting an environmental disaster, action to counter climate must be taken urgently by eliminating the use of fossil fuels. The destruction of forests too must be averted. Carbon dioxide must be treated as an environmental pollutant, and large amounts of money donated towards drastically curb emissions lest the sky fall on our heads. It would be better to risk wasting money on averting an imaginary threat than to find out only too late that it was all too real.

The fact is both the discourse and counter-discourse are deeply problematic in how they constantly lock horns, wasting precious time going nowhere.

A far more enlightened way of looking at climate change is not merely as a tree hugging exercise, but to see it as an enormous economic opportunity. The fact is that as the world economy grows and more developing nations industrialise, it will not be possible to continue to rely on fossil fuels for the world’s future energy demands. That means vision is needed so we can easily manufacture energy without reliance on a profoundly limited resource, one that is will likely have an adverse economic impact in terms of environmental disturbances.

Energy manufacture may not be a common term. However, just because something is perishable such as electricity, it remains correct to use the term “manufacture”. As Einstein’s famous equation (e=mc2) states, matter and energy are the same thing anyway. Thus all matter is as perishable as energy. The expression “energy manufacture” covers the concept of electricity manufacture, as well as synthetic manufacture of forms of low emission synthetic fuels. It is only a matter of time, anyway, before electricity can be stored.

The beauty of this is that energy manufacture will replace the increasingly dated process of arduously digging up fossils from the ground, and will reduce this cumbersome procedure to a complete waste of time and money. Being able to manufacture energy at will, often literally out of thin air, also has the advantage of producing energy independence. After all, the Liberal Party is concerned about food independence, so energy independence should be just another facet of the same objective of geopolitical sovereignty.

If energy independence is achieved, no longer will geopolitical events in the Middle East affect energy prices in the matter that conspired to engender the oil shock. Not only that, but energy manufacture will be an enormous industry within Australia. Instead of importing energy, Australia will manufacture its own. The energy manufacturing sector will contribute a huge amount of GDP to the future Australian economy.

Anyone with any vision and foresight would be licking their chops at the prospect of such a future. Especially anyone concerned for the future economic prosperity of Australia. Before resources dug up from the ground like coal and oil end up defunct dinosaur fuels for a dated 20th century technology, a product that nobody wants to pay decent money for, Australia had better get cracking setting down the foundations of its autonomous energy future.

A perfect way of starting to build Australia’s energy manufacturing future would be to collect a tax on old fashioned fossil fuels and aggressively reinvesting it in the future energy infrastructure. After all, in the future, the political masters of the world will no longer be those who own or hold political hegemony over fossil fuel resources, but those who own the patents to the new clean energy technology.

If Australia invested in developing clean energy technology ahead of the rest of the world so that it held clean a large proportion of major energy patents, Australia would become a political and economic giant. But the Liberal Party wishes to fight tooth and nail to forgo such a prime opportunity at all cost. That is why Tony Abbott is staunchly opposing the discussion of a clean energy future at the Brisbane G20.

Whoever thinks that building the energy infrastructure future is too expensive is an abject fool who thinks that fighting for the license to print money (ownership of energy patents), and setting up money printing presses (manufacturing energy) is too expensive to bother with. Yet, in that race, Australia is getting itself dreadfully behind and getting left out in what will soon be a clean energy technology gold rush, while dinosaur fuel stocks crash and dwindle to oblivion.

It will not be long before the next stock market boom will be the clean energy manufacturing sector boom, akin to the nineteenth century railway stock boom, or the twentieth century IT boom. Investing in this sector now is like investing in Microsoft stock in the 1970s, something people may have laughed at or belittled at the time, just as some people ridicule the clean energy sector today.

Apple computer was started by the young Steve Jobs in the back of a garage. The fledgling clean energy sector will be the next technology revolution to propel the economy, and investment here will reap rewards for those who have sufficient vision for a better future.

As for whether climate change is real or not, that matters precious little. The majority of developed nations in the world accept this. Even fossil fuel corporations accept this. The die is cast. Anyone who buries their head the sand will merely get left behind and lose out in the race, while rambling that it is not happening. After a while, trying to export fossil fuel to the rest of the world on the argument that climate change is some giant conspiracy will not only be laughed at, but the demand for such fuels will fall so low that it will hardly command a price worthwhile even bother to peddle such worthless junk.

To invest in an Australian future based on an energy technology that is rapidly becoming obsolete is foolish beyond belief. To dismantle carbon pricing is like dismantling the high speed broadband network to invest in dial up modem technology on the basis that it represented the bright future of Australia. It is rather nothing more than planned suicide for the Australian economy.

The only reason the Liberal government government would implement such a plan would be to please the pressure groups formed by the mining corporations. Tony Abbott is merely serving the interests of mining companies who fund the Liberal Party rather than serving the long-term national interest. Short term political gain is being put ahead of the future of the nation. After all compared to the long future of the Australian energy sector, a politician’s shelf-life is very short. It is about short term political gain for long term national pain.

It is even more laughable that the alternative to carbon pricing will be a risible tree planting exercise that does nothing to plant the seeds of what will be an enormous Australian clean energy manufacturing industry. Nor do scientific authorities believe it will do much towards reducing greenhouse emissions. It is, in effect, little more than a emotional Liberal tree hugging exercise, one that leaves the Greens on the side impotently pushing for a hard-nosed economically rational market mechanism for greenhouse emission reduction!

So, it seems the Greens and the Liberals have swapped roles. The Greens push for tough-minded market based economic infrastructure building while the Liberals waste money indulging in a $2.5 billion dollar tree hugging exercise, a dopey hippy’s programme of rosy-eyed symbolic and sentimental value only, one that does little in the way of the hard-nosed national infrastructure building that Tony Abbott claimed he would commit himself towards.

Of course, as far as the mining companies are concerned, the major advantage of mobilising the comical Green Army of tree huggers is that it will avert doing anything towards bolstering competition from the looming clean energy sector, competition that increasingly threatens the monopoly of the fossil fuel energy sector. Rather than believing in market capitalism and encouraging free competition, while building the future infrastructure and prosperity of the nation, the Liberal government is supporting dinosaurian monopolies to quash the rowdy upstart clean energy sector that increasing threatens to render the fossil fuel industry obsolete.

Worse still, encouraging private households to sell solar energy fed back into the grid would further whittle away the hegemony of fossil fuel energy behemoths, while giving power to individuals. Nothing could be worse than that for the Liberal Party, for then the fossil fuel industries that fund the Party would have their energy sector monopoly threatened. It is this empowerment of individual households by collectively turning them into energy manufacturers that makes the development of solar energy so popular amongst German voters of all political persuasions, yet the voters in much sunnier Australia have been silenced, and instructed to continue to line the pockets of Liberal Party’s mining industry donors.

As for all of those things mentioned by environmentalists about polar bears having their habitat threatened, indigenous peoples in the Amazon having their homeland destroyed, not to mention increasing droughts threatening farmers and forest fires threatening homes—they still remain deeply important.

Emotive energy policy talking about cute polar bears and tree hugging needs to be replaced with evidence based economic policy.

The problem is that weeping ostentatiously over polar bears and indigenous peoples, however utterly tragic their fate, represents time wasted merely preaching to the converted, while leaving heartless conservatives utterly unmoved or even violently repulsed. If the human species is to have a future, we must move away from weepy, sentimental green jingoism towards a ruthlessly scientific, evidence based energy policy backed by rigorous economic analysis.

Yet despite holding such emotively based idealistic arguments in utter contempt, the Liberal government has turned into everything they claim to fight against by wasting $2.5 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money, money that the reputedly impossibly debt ridden nation cannot afford, in some sentimental tree hugging Direct Action programme. It is hard to stop laughing loud enough.

Tony Abbott: the ultimate dopey tree hugger. The Liberal Party of Australia needs a sober energy policy to carry Australia into the future, or else risk being utterly decimated in the race to win a place in the new energy world order.

One who fights monsters must beware turning into the very monsters one purports to be fight. Yet that is exactly the trap that the Liberal government has fallen into. For there is nothing neoliberal or market capitalist about these tree hugging “Liberals”, who have forsaken market mechanisms to drive energy technology development. Instead they should rename themselves the Tree Hugger Party, lead by one truly dopey Prime Minister, tripping on his own hallucinogenic ideology.

In a previous post I correctly predicted a brutally neoliberal budget that would impose austerity on the Australian economy in a way that recalls the sort of austerity measures imposed on nations in genuine debt crises like Greece, Ireland or Spain. The catastrophic failure of other political parties to counter the blatant lies sold to the public about a fictional debt crisis through the Murdoch-owed media was breathtakingly woeful to behold. Greece has a debt to GDP ratio of 175%, whereas that of Australia is the best in the OECD. I quote:

Australia has the lowest debt (measured by Gross Financial Liabilities) in the OECD. In 2013, Australia’s Debt to GDP ratio was 34.4 %, Germany was 80.9 %, the UK at 111.6 %, USA at 106.5 % and the OECD average was 112.0 %.

In a way, although there is evidence that they flinched just a little before plunging in the knife*, the Abbott-Hockey budget was in many way still everything expected of it, with the brunt of the burden of expenditure cuts bourn by those most vulnerable and least able to afford it. Gone is the age when Henry Ford once insisted on a decent minimal wage, given that if the masses were not decently paid they would be unable to afford to buy his cars—en masse. Where, one wonders, does the money paid by a welfare beneficiary for a loaf of bread go? It goes to the outlet that sells it, the baker who bakes it: both parts of the Australian economic infrastructure. Give tax breaks to multinationals corporation, as the government has done, and the money is more likely to “disappear” out of the Australian economy. Nor in the face of the GFC did capital flinch at accepting bale-outs for their mistakes: corporate welfare, where tax collected from the average person is given to corporations who preach the evils of government monetary intervention.

Alas, the neoliberal dogma of the trickle-down effect, used to justify making the rich richer and the poor poorer, simply does not lead to a better or more just society at all, let alone a more affluent one. In future, either we will all be capitalist lords or serfs—assuming we are not there already. As the aristocracy blamed the alleged innately lowly “stock” of serfs to argue the pointlessness of liberating them or giving them opportunities, so too are a growing number of people trapped in the poverty cycle dependent on welfare, but where their allegedly innate laziness and lack of enterprise is used to justify cutting ever more brutally from their welfare payments. Far from it, the disparity between rich and poor today is increasingly reaching proportions resembling the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries:

The disparity in remuneration between average workers and CEO’s stood at around thirty to one in 1970. It now is well above three hundred to one and in the case of MacDonalds about 1200 to one.

The corporate aristocracy rules over nations using the Murdoch news empire to spread its propaganda. The petty anaesthetising amusements manufactured by the pop culture industry, including mass spectator sports and reality TV, serves as the new opiate of the masses. The Murdochs and Rineharts of the world rule as a new capitalist aristocracy, who live in gaudy palaces resembling that of Versailles. They virtually own the government, which, as everything under capitalism, is up for sale—just like any other commodity in neoliberal economics. Parliamentarians in the age of constitutional monarchy did more to stand up to the powers exerted by monarchs than political parties today. Once again, Oliver Twist goes hungry when he dares to plead “please Sir, may I have some more?” Those wretches on welfare are just too greedy, after all.

This is why the metaphor of the “out-of-touch cigar chomping capitalist” used by Bill Shorten to describe the Liberals is already out of date in that it recalls the rich industrialists of the early to mid twentieth century.

Things have gotten much worse than that today, for the figure of the rich, cigar chomping industrialist is already too modern, and too progressive to describe our age. Rather, levels of income inequality have regressed to the point that the metaphor of the peruked aristocrat is far more apt to describe our age. If inequality continues to grow at this rate, one wonders if it is only a matter of time before not only the fashion for the peruke, but that for the guillotine will also see its revival as proletarian outrage turns to violence. For now, though, what rich rewards awaiteth their obedience to the capitalist aristocracy? Knighthood, of course! Arise Sir Joe. Arise Sir Tony. Thou hast carried out thy duty to thy Masters well:

* It has been pointed out that there are some Keynesian infrastructure building elements to the budget of a kind diametrically opposed to strict neoliberalism. This suggests that the government lacked the courage to fully make good with their extreme neoliberalist rhetoric with universally lower taxes and no government-driven infrastructure stimulus whatsoever. If they had the stomach for it, they would have certainly achieved the neoliberal dream of exposing Australia to the international recession that the extraordinary Rudd government Keynesian stimulus saved it from. In the neoliberal dogma, to intervene against the capitalist “self-regulating” natural order in this interventionist manner is evil. However much neoliberals yearn for such ideological puritanism, to actually plunge the knife in by casting Australia straight into the abyss of recession is something even the Liberals have flinched from fully carrying out. So some Keynesian infrastructure stimulus elements managed to creep in. The result is a budget ideologically neither fish nor fowl. Yet, once the mining boom fades, the Liberals may still see their wish fulfilled, as the more discreet jack-knife they have plunged in ultimately has the same effect, since the 22 year recession-free run of the Australian economy has to come to end at some time. As the song about Mack the Knife goes, when Mack the pro hitman strikes with his jack-knife, it is clean without messy splatter. But one must beware what one wishes for, as sometimes this is the greatest possible of nightmares. Once the mining boom ends, Abbott will likely get that wish he flinched at the spectre of. For Tony Abbott seems to live under the delusion that the prosperity of the Howard years had something to do with Howard neoliberalist spending cuts and staunch fiscal discipline. The truth is that the mining boom allowed them to buy themselves into three terms of government, by spending freely like drunken sailors.

It is looking as though Australia is about to be hit with the same sort of austerity measures being imposed on countries like Greece and Spain. It is utterly bizarre given that the Australian bottom line demonstrates one of the healthiest economies in the world, measured in terms of debt to GDP ratio. Australia is the envy of the OECD. Yet just as thin anorexics look in a mirror and see only a need to diet more severely, so to do Tony Abbott see a need for severe austerity.

The real problem here is one of economic principles. The Global Financial Crisis left neoliberalism looking rather hollow. Instead of facing up to reality, neoliberals have decided that the solution to the problem was more of the same thing that engendered the crisis. So today, I thought I would recommend a couple of good books that make for a good intellectual antidote to this sort of nonsense thinking.

I thought this introduction to the book by the publisher summed up the issue with the Australian Liberal Party handling of the economy rather well:

At the onset of the Great Recession, as house prices sank and joblessness soared, many commentators concluded that the economic convictions behind the disaster would now be consigned to history. And yet, in the harsh light of a new day, we’ve awoken to a second nightmare more ghastly than the first: a political class still blaming government intervention, a global drive for austerity, stagflation, and an international sovereign debt crisis.

It is precisely the nightmare that is the Australian Commonwealth Budget about to be delivered by the Abbott government. It is a government stuck in the economic thinking of the 1980’s.

2. The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity by Paul Davidson

It is worth reading that in the era of neoliberalism how different the attitudes were after the Great Depression and the WWII including amongst the political right. Since then the right has jettisoned the Keynesian orthodoxy of the past, and adopted neoliberalism. It has been assumed that Keynes is dead and buried but there is an encouraging resurgence of interest in his thinking after the Great Recession. Of course, there is a resurgence of interest in Marxist economic analysis too, and his insights too deserve to be re-read in a fresh light (without the usual vulgar Marxist readings that lead Marx to proclaim that he was not a Marxist).

3. Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer)

I have left the best to last. This book has reached the bestseller list and has caught on like wildfire. It is a tremendous critique of contemporary capitalism.

However, it is all a little too late for the Abbott government, which is taking a Tea Party style extreme neoliberalist ideological line. When in opposition, I thought it might just be theatre and grandstanding, and that once in a position of responsibility, I hoped that a certain economic pragmatism would set in, but that has proven to be far from the case. This lot are so deluded that they really do believe in their own rhetoric.

The following excerpts are taken from Karlheinz Deschner’s book, God and the Fascists. Although written forty years ago, it has only just appeared in English translation for the very first time. It is clearly a book that has been suppressed by the church in the same way that news about paedophile priests has been suppressed. It is a book that reveals the naked truth about the Catholic Church to which Tony Abbott belongs and which blesses him in the same way it blessed Croatian ultra-Catholic fascist leader, Ante Pavelić, whose brutality was so immense that even the Nazis protested, utterly appalled by their gross excesses—whereas Pope Pius XII uttered not a word of protest, and instead blessed Pavelić.

Keep in mind the reason for the name “Nazi”. It was a contraction of the name, “Ignatius”, just as Rick is a contraction of Richard. Someone by the name of “Ignatius” was called “Nazi”. The reason why the National Socialists were nicknamed “Nazi” was only partly because of its German name of “Nationalsozialismus”. The other principle reason for the nickname “Nazi” was that Ignatius was a stereotypically Catholic name because the party originated in the south, in Catholic Bavaria, as a Catholic political party—a bit like the Liberals at the moment:

Of course, Tony Abbott is a graduate of St. Ignatius School in Sydney: St “Nazi”. Or to quote from the editor’s introduction of Deschner’s God and the Fascists:

In his resume at the end of the book, Karlheinz Deschner says, in 1965, “If one considers the attitude of Eugenio Pacelli to the politics of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, and Pavelic, it hardly seems an exaggeration to say: Pius XII is probably more incriminated than any other pope has been for centuries. He is so obviously involved in the most hideous atrocities of the Fascist era, and therefore of history itself, both directly and indirectly, that it would not be surprising, given the tactics of the Roman Church, if he were to be canonized.” And now the beatification is already under way, less than fifty years later! If Hitler had won the war, one may wish to add, then he would presumably have long since attained the same Catholic honors.

After the German troops had invaded Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941, and occupied this country too, they cooperated with Croatia’s Fascist-Catholic movement, the Ustaše Party (“Ustaše” — “rebel”). Their intellectual progenitor Ante Starčević was of the view that there should not be any Serbs at all, that everything called “Serbian” must disappear, which was why, as Starčević wrote, “the Serbs [are] work for the slaughterhouse.”

The Ustaše now proceeded against the Serbs according to this principle, led by Dr. Ante Pavelić, a former lawyer from Agram. Pavelić certainly viewed himself as a scholar of Starčević, who was glorified in the so-called Independent State of Croatia as “the greatest Croatian political ideologue,” as “the creator of the ideological basis,” and as an “example for Ustaše fighters.”

…

On April 10, 1941, when Pavelić was still absent, an “Independent State of Croatia” was proclaimed, which also included Bosnia, Herzegovina, part of Dalmatia, and some purely Serbian borderlands. Of the roughly six million inhabitants of this state, only about three million were Catholic Croatians, two million were Orthodox (Serbs or Bosnians), and more than half a million were Bosnian Muslims. The rest were ethnic Germans, Magyars, Jews, Slovenians, Czechs, and others

The proclamation begins and ends with the name of God: “God’s providence, the will of our great ally, the centuries-old struggle of the Croatian people and the great willingness to sacrifice for our leader Ante Pavelić and the Ustaše movement both at home and abroad have ordained that today, before the resurrection of the Son of God, our independent state of Croatia will be resurrected.” And at the end of the proclamation, it says again: “God be with the Croats! Ready for the Fatherland!” —In the night of April 13, Pavelić crossed the Italian-Yugoslavian border; on April 17, he appointed his first cabinet. Then southern Serbia was given to the Bulgarians, a part of the northern province was occupied by the Hungarians, and in May, Pavelić traveled to Rome with his ministers and some clergy, including Archbishop Stepinac’s vicar general, Bishop Salis-Sewis, and ceded more than half of Dalmatia to Italy, to which he also made further major concessions. The so-called crown of Zvonimir (the last independent Croatian king from the eleventh century) was offered to King and Emperor Victor Emanuel III for Duke Aimone of Spoleto, who had already appeared at the Vatican as the designated king of Croatia on May 17, but who, for reasons of caution, never entered his kingdom.

The day after, Pavelić—sentenced to death in absentia because of the double murder of Marseilles twice, by France and Yugoslavia—in addition to his sizeable entourage (Pavelić, “surrounded by his bandits,” as the Italian foreign minister Count Ciano had already written in his diary some weeks previously) was also received and blessed in a particularly solemn private audience by Pius XII. Croatia’s Catholic press were very moved by the attention and warmth of the pope, who finally dismissed Pavelić and his retinue amicably with best wishes for their “further work.”

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Countless Serbian clergy suffered horrific torture. In Zagreb, where Archbishop Stepinac and the Apostolic nuncio Marcone resided, the Orthodox metropolitan Dositej was beaten and tortured to such a bestial extent that it made him insane.

Three princes of the Orthodox Church, Bishop Platon of Banja Luka, the metropolitan of Sarajevo, Peter Zimonjić, and the bishop of Sava as well as several hundred Orthodox clergy were murdered.’ Bishop Platon and his companion, the priest Dusan Subotic, had their eyes gouged out while a fire burned on their chests, and their noses and ears were cut off before they were finally given the death blow. The Catholic clergy demanded that the Orthodox convert everywhere. “When you have come over to the Catholic Church,” Bishop Aksamovic of Đakovo promised, for instance, “you will be left in peace in your homes.” Many became Catholic in this way but even more were massacred.

Just a few pieces of evidence.

One night at the end of April 1941, Ustaše surrounded the Serbian villages of Gudovec, Tuko, Brestovac, and Dolac in the district of Bjelovar. Then they had the Orthodox priest Božin, the teacher, Ivanković, and 250 peasants, men and women, dig a grave, tied their hands behind their backs, and buried them alive.

In Otočac, 331 Serbs were liquidated and the Orthodox priest, Branko Dobrosavljević, was forced to pray in front of the tortured and dying while his little son lay literally cut into pieces before his eyes. Then the priest’s hair and beard were torn off, his eyes were gouged out, and he was tortured until he died.

The same crime happened in Svinjica, in the province of Banija.

In Kosinj, where the Ustaše had gathered six hundred Serbs, a mother had to catch the blood of her four sons in a bowl.

In Mliniste, in the district of Glamoč, a former member of parliament, Luka Avramovic, and his son were crucified.

When Pavelić held an audience with the Catholic episcopate on June 26, 1941, and Archbishop Stepinac said, “we attest our deference with all our heart and promise devoted and loyal cooperation for the brightest future of our fatherland,” three Orthodox bishops, more than one hundred Orthodox priests and members of the Order, and 180,000 Serbs and Jews had been murdered in Catholic Croatia within six weeks.

In the following month, July 1941, the Ustaše killed more than 100,000 Serbian women and children in just a few days in houses, schools, prisons, and Orthodox churches, on streets and in fields. The church at Glina, for example, was converted into a slaughterhouse according to a report from the Ustaše involved, Hilmia Berberović. “The bloodbath lasted from 10 in the evening until 4 in the morning and went on that way for eight days. The killers’ uniforms had to be changed because they were drenched with blood. Later, impaled children with limbs still bent in pain were found. Two thousand Serbian men, women, and children were killed in the butchery that had been ordered by the justice minister Dr. Mirko Puk, who came from Glina, and the prior of the Franciscan monasteries of Cuntic, Hermenegildo alias Castimir Hermann.

The death lists are nearly endless. Every small subordinate commander went on a manhunt and quickly reported his successes to the authorities in order to be decorated by them. The Ustaše commandant of Vojnić called Zagreb, saying: “Hunt plentiful today. 500 in total.”

This included atrocities that nearly make the deeds committed by Hitler’s concentration camp minions pale into insignificance. The Ustaše pushed red-hot nails under fingernails and rubbed salt into open wounds. They mutilated all possible body parts. One penchant was to cut their victims’ noses and ears off and gouge their eyes out. The Italians photographed an Ustaše who wore two chains of human tongues and eyes around his neck.

The Italian author Curzio Malaparte interviewed Pavelić in Zagreb.

“While he spoke,” Malaparte wrote, “I looked at a wicker basket that was on his desk to the right of the Poglavnik. The basket was opened and a lot of sea creatures or something similar appeared.

‘Oysters from Dalmatia?’ I asked. Ante Pavelić lifted the lid and showed me what looked like a mass of sticky, gelatinous oysters. He said with a tired, friendly smile: “A gift from my loyal Ustaše. Forty pounds of human eyes!” This was the man Pius XII had blessed.

EVEN THE GERMANS PROTESTED

At the Führer’s headquarters, the special envoy of the foreign office for the southeast of Europe, Hermann Neubacher—who was therefore Pavelić’s “State Enemy no. 1″—repeatedly reported of “truly horrific events in my Croatian neighborhood,” to which Hitler replied: “I have also told the Poglavnik that such a minority cannot simply be wiped out: it is too big!” And on another occasion, Hitler said: “I will finish with this regime one day—but not now!” –”Now” he had a blatantly cynical “understanding” for the butchery and spoke out against “staying the hand of the Croatians’ actions against the Serbs.”‘

And why not? Especially when even the pope kept silent!

But the German envoy in Zagreb interceded with both oral and written communications to the Ustaše government.'” And the German general Glaise von Horstenau also told Pavelić of “his serious doubts about the Ustaše’s excesses . . . and he substantiated his communications with numerous concrete examples from most recent times.”

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Several monks assumed executioners’ posts in a concentration camp. The Franciscan Zvonko Brekalo was an officer at the death camp of Jasenovac, notorious because of his mass beheadings. About 120,000 Serbs died there. In the fall of 1942, the Franciscan Miroslav Filipović-Majstorovic, called “Brother Devil,” actually ran this camp, supported by a series of clergy—Brkljačić, Matković, Matijevic, Brekalo, Celina, Lipovac and others. Forty thousand people were liquidated in four months under the command of the Franciscan father. The Franciscan scholar Brzica alone beheaded 1,360 people with a special knife in one night, on August 29, 1942.

Edmond Paris, who lists a “horrific litany” of Franciscan crimes, affirms that this list could be “extended infinitely.”

After the collapse of the Catholic regiment, it was, tellingly, foreign Franciscan monasteries that became refuges for the mass murderers, Klagenfhrt in Austria, Modena in Italy, and also monasteries in France. “All these monasteries hid the escaped Ustaše. These criminals received Church help and support everywhere. This was only too understandable since the deeds of the Ustaše were deeds of the Church.”

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Pavelić and Artuković found sanctuary in the monastery of St. Gilgen near Salzburg, “laden with stolen gold.” They were then arrested by British troops but soon released again as a consequence of a “mysterious intervention.” Artuković went to Switzerland in November 1946, then later to Ireland, and finally to the United States, where he now lives in Los Angeles [he was finally extradited to Yugoslavia and sentenced to death but died in 1988 of ill health after winning a stay of execution on these grounds].

Pavelić, who did not feel safe in Austria because of the Yugoslavian government’s efforts to extradite him, went to Rome disguised as a priest where he lived in a monastery as Father Gomez and Father Benarez. At the end of 1948 he went to Buenos Aires as Pablo Aranyoz, still in possession of 250 kg of gold and 1,100 carats of precious stones—and he was accompanied by the former liaison between Archbishop Stepinac and the Vatican, the priest Krunoslav Draganović, with whom he had been provided by the Commissione d’assistanza pontifical.

Pavelić had to go underground after the overthrow of Peron in 1955. On April 10, 1957, he escaped an assassination attempt with a revolver and later the Argentinian police as well. He somehow managed to reach Franco’s Spain and, undisturbed by judiciary, found refuge in a Franciscan monastery in Madrid. The criminal died in the German hospital in the Spanish capital on December 26, 1959, and, on his death bed, received yet another blessing from the Holy Father. (There is still [in 1965], incidentally, a strict Ustaše organization in Spain, led first by Archbishop Šarić and now by Vjekoslav Luburić, the former commandant of all Croatian concentration camps.) Hitler’s photographer, writes Edmond Paris at the end of his documentation, was sentenced to ten years merely for committing the crime of photographing the Führer. By contrast, thousands of serious Ustaše criminals went unpunished, despite countless protests and memoranda, just because they were under the protection of the Catholic Church.

Only the boats they turned back were full of Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust. It is something that I have been writing about for a while reminding readers that the UN convention on refugees that Australia shows such disdain for today was set up in the wake of the refugee crisis engendered by the Holocaust. One simply wonders whether the radical right in Australia today are not only climate change deniers but Holocaust deniers too. Even the term “conservative revolution” is exactly the rhetoric used by Spanish, Italian and German fascists. Spanish fascists fighting the republicans certainly spoke of their war as a “revolution”.

In any case, if they talk about what I think they are going to talk about, Tony Abbott isn’t going to like it one bit. It will add to his case for shutting down the ABC. He might like to replace it with a party mouthpiece called “The Populist Observer”. If you are wondering why, it is because over the years there has been a huge controversy on how to translate the German term Völkisch (pronounced “furlkish”, the adjective from “Volk”, pronounced “folk”, meaning “the people”) into English and many historians have tended to leave it in German untranslated e.g. in the name of the National Socialist Party mouthpiece “Die Völkische Beobachter”. Today, it seems the best translation for “Völkisch” is “populist”, replacing the German word “Volk” meaning “people” with the Latin word “populi” also meaning “the people”, so that newspaper name “Die Völkische Beobachter” should be translated as “The Populist Observer”. The story of the sociopolitical origins and character of the “völkische Bewegung” (populist movement) in Pan-Germanist ultra-nationalism and National Socialism is a whole, highly involved blog post (or even a whole book) in its own right. But, for now, suffice to say that the Australian far right (including the current Liberal government) today are perfectly rightly described as being “populist” or Völkisch.

This is the church to which Tony Abbott belongs. This is the sort of totalitarian mentality that it promotes and which it brings to the mainstream political table. There is a reason why Americans have only ever voted in one Catholic president and that was someone clearly modern and liberal: John F. Kennedy. You couldn’t say that about Abbott.